The Poetry Assignment
by Flame Tigress
Summary: Harry Potter and co. are given a surprise assignment -- write a poem. Haikus, limericks, sonnnets, making fun of Goths, doodling, and generally having too much fun on my part.


Harry and Ron walked out of Professor McGonagall's classroom feeling somewhat dazed ****

Disclaimer: I do not own the Harry Potter characters or universe. I am only having them write a little poetry before I give them back to the magnificent J.K Rowling.

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The Poetry Assignment

Harry and Ron walked out of Professor McGonagall's classroom feeling somewhat dazed.

Iambic pentameter, dactyllic dimeter, sonnets, haikus, abecedariuses, and the names of various wizard poets were still swimming sluggishly around in their overloaded heads.

"I can't believe they're making the standards include Muggle English," Ron moaned miserably. "If this is some elaborate joke the teachers cooked up, I'm going on a murder rampage and then committing suicide."

"We have to write a poem," Harry stated again, expressionlessly, disbelievingly. "I cannot write a poem."

They passed Cho Chang and her group of friends in the hall, and Harry shrank against the wall, staring longingly at his crush. Apparently she and the other sixth-years had been given the same assignment, for she was telling her friends, "I thought of a haiku just now! It goes:

__

Wind soughs in the trees,

Barely stirs the lake's surface.

Nature breathes a sigh."

"Wow!" and "That's really good!" came from various members of the flock of girls.

"The syllables in the second line don't quite fit the rhythm…" Cho complained, trailing off as she and her friends progressed down the hall. Harry let out a despairing groan and started banging his head against the wall. Ron stared at him warily.

An old lady knitting in a nearby painting looked up from her activity to say, "Now, then, dearie, you'll hurt yourself doing that!" which only prompted Harry to hit his head harder.

"Er…Harry? Are you okay?" Ron asked hesitantly.

"I – can't – write – poetry – for – sh…toffee!" Harry moaned, punctuating each word with another head-bang.

"Almost offended an old lady's sensitive ears, there, sonny!" the little old lady in the painting reproved, shaking her knitting needle at Harry warningly. He looked up from his self-abuse to scowl at her. Ron took the opportunity to pull Harry away from the wall by the neck of his robes to keep him from damaging his head.

"Come on, we have to go to Divination. Unfortunately."

"To wallow in something else miserable that we can't do!"

~~~~~~~~~

At lunch, Harry and Ron rejoined Hermione at the Gryffindor table.

"How about that poem assignment, eh?" Ron asked, sitting down heavily.

Hermione shrugged, not looking up from the book she was reading. Harry didn't bother to look at the title.

"I don't think it's a bad idea at all to acquaint the wizarding youth with the aspects of our language that Muggle children are educated in," she opined.

"You would," Ron commented disgustedly, helping himself to some meat pie.

"I think I'm going to write a sonnet," she mused. "It is of reasonable length, with syllabic and rhythmic structure."

"Er…aren't sonnets love poems?" Harry ventured dubiously.

Ron snorted, spraying vegetables halfway across the table. "Writing about Viktor Krum?"

Hermione looked at him sternly over the top of her book. " 'Love' does not necessarily connote human romance."

"Oh, Crookshanks, how I love thee!" Ron mocked, imitating a feminine voice.

"We know, Ron, no need to announce it to the entire world," Fred called from a few seats down the table.

"Shut up, you git," Ron snapped at him.

~~~~~~~~~

In the Gryffindor common room, reclined in one of the poofy armchairs, Harry checked his watch. It was ten o'clock at night. He had already finished the worksheet on Invisibility Charms, the reading in _A History of Magic,_ and his contrived doomsday predictions for Divination. All that was left was the poem.

He glanced over at Hermione, who was studying something or another at a table in the corner. Ron was also idle in an armchair, following the progress of a spider on the wall with his wand, an apprehensive look on his face. Seamus was playing wizard chess with Dean, who was not really paying attention to the game as he doodled people kicking checkered balls. Something blasted loudly; Ron's wand came down, and he looked very satisfied about something. There was now a small hole on the wall where the spider had been.

"Have you written the poem yet?" Harry asked Ron gloomily.

"Nope," Ron responded.

There was silence for a little while. "It won't be the first time we've gotten detention," Harry tried unsuccessfully to console himself. "Or the last."

"You don't _want _to get detention, do you?" Hermione said reprovingly.

"Do we have any other options?" Ron retorted.

"There's always blowing up the school," George suggested from the corner, where he and Fred were up to something – as usual.

"Have _you _written a poem, Mr. Smartypants?" Ron challenged.

"Of course," George defended himself, a feigned injured look on his face. "Allow me to demonstrate:

__

Agony, rending, pain, torture,

Drowning in a cold, black, swirling river of death,

Sinister depths, a current of overwhelming torment!"

George stood up, acting out his words with dramatic gesticulations.

__

"Bowels ripped from an anguished body,

Severed by cutting daggers of doom!

The acrid scent of flesh burning,

Consumed by anger, hate, desire!

I welcome pain, I welcome death!

All is dust, all is ashes;

Writhing in the agony of killing winds!

BWA HA HA HA HAAAA!"

George rose from his concluding prostrate position and bowed in gratitude at the enthusiastic applause that filled the Gryffindor common room after his performance.

" 'Bwa ha ha ha haaaa'?" Ron asked skeptically, his eyebrows raised.

"You could write a limerick, like I did," Seamus offered from his chess game. "It's an Irish form of humorous poetry. Let's see, where did I put it?" He rummaged around among some homework papers. "Ah, here we go:

__

My home is the emerald land.

The terrain and tradition are grand.

Our music is great,

Our dancing first-rate – 

But the people…er…a beer-loving band…"

The poem seemed to trail off uncertainly, and again the Gryffindors applauded. Seamus pretended to be embarrassed.

"Well, at least that way, I won't have to take it seriously," Ron said optimistically. "What'd you write, Dean?"

"Huh?" Dean said distractedly, drawing a look of intense concentration on a football player's face. "Oh. Concrete poem. I just drew a chap playing football and filled it in with the words 'football player' and 'goal score.'"

"That would be a good idea…if I had any artistic ability," Harry said glumly. Ron nodded agreement.

"Someone give me a piece of parchment, please?" Harry requested. Hermione pulled one off the stack that she always kept beside her when she studied and handed it to him. Harry rummaged in his book bag for a quill and ink, and started absently doodling words and crossing them out nearly as often as he wrote them.

"How's the sonnet to Crookshanks coming, Hermione?" Ron taunted.

"It is _not _about Crookshanks," Hermione began.

"That's your topic, Ron," Fred piped up, whereupon Ron flashed a rather rude hand gesture at him.

"And I finished it," Hermione continued.

"Let's hear it, then," Ron said.

Hermione cleared her throat. "Ode to a Book," she introduced her sonnet.

__

"The book – the subtle wisdom in each page,

The messages that in each phrase one finds – 

Be't written by a fool or by a sage,

Their words reveal the contents of their minds.

Conveying thought or fact, a book imparts

Much knowledge, whether it is wrong or true;

Emotions of both good and traitor hearts,

Ideas spanning time and springing new.

Each volume is an undiscovered land,

A secret – tantalizing, out of reach;

A great adventure resting in my hand,

Beneath my nose, so many things to teach.

Some well-, some badly written, but for all

A reader's waiting to be held in thrall."

Awed, disgusted silence fell over the common room this time.

"I think I'd rather go with the limerick," Ron commented.

"That's what I did," Neville said cheerfully. "Seamus told me about the format, and I wrote one:

__

My toad is a chappy named Trevor.

He and I, we aren't horribly clever.

He's looking quite thin, poor him – 

Professor Snape's got it in for him.

What with that, Trevor won't last forever."

Neville sounded so genuinely morose when he read his poem that it provoked a laugh from the gathered audience, and Neville blushed modestly.

"Along those lines, you could write a limerick about Scabbers," Harry suggested. "What'd you write?" he asked of Parvati and Lavender, who were in another part of the common room.

"Haikus," Lavender replied. "They can capture powerfully a single moment of nature."

"Plus, they're short," Ron teased them.

Parvati marched over and smacked him playfully, then returned to where she and Lavender had been working.

Harry resumed scribbling words randomly, crossing out, and scribbling more.

__

"Voila," Ron said with a flourish of his quill. "A limerick about Scabbers."

Hermione got up, stretched, and walked over to Ron's armchair to look over his shoulder. He hid the paper defensively.

"Read it aloud, do," Hermione said coolly.

"Very well," he said, his ears turning red. "_Ahem!_

Scabbers was the name of my rat.

He was useless, stupid, and fat.

He just ate and slept,

Don't know why I kept

Him…but then he got eaten by a cat."

Ron glared pointedly at Hermione during the scattered applause and laughter following the reading.

"And you were furious with me until you found out that not only was Scabbers still alive, but he was also a follower of You-Know-Who and a traitor," Hermione muttered so that only Ron could hear. He whapped her lightly.

"So, Harry, got a poem yet?" Ron called.

"Er…I think so. Hermione? Could you come look it over?"

She moved over to Harry's armchair, and he handed her the piece of parchment on which he had been writing. Ron got up with some difficulty to read it over her shoulder.

__

Starshine on a lake

Moonlight on the trees

Stillness

Calm

Only memories wake

Fleeting shadows

Silvery wisps

Halfway between light and shadow

Warmth and chill

Glory and defeat

Life and death

"Oh," Hermione said, surprised. "That was…interesting."

"Er…Harry?" Ron asked warily. "What have you been taking?"

"It's beautiful, Harry," Hermione began.

"But…?"

"But what has it to do with _you?_ What makes it personal?"

Harry took the parchment back and stared at it thoughtfully. "Hmmm…" Thinking about what had inspired the poem, Harry hastily wrote three words and handed it back to Hermione.

__

Prongs rides again.

****

Author's Note: Well, this started out as a poem fic – just Harry's poem; I added the last line basically the way he did – thinking of what inspired the poem, and how to make it pertain to Harry Potter so I could post it on FanFiction.net. That being the poem that Harry would write (if he wrote poetry), I started thinking about what other Harry Potter characters might write; that's where the limericks came from, as well as Hermione's sonnet. I write a lot of haikus; Cho's was a nice, melancholy little piece whose rhythmic inconsistency in the second line served as a plot device. The entire surprise poetry assignment story was just a function of my wondering about why the Hogwarts students never learned the Muggle subjects, such as English, math, and physical science, that are supposed to be basic (and it was also a way of making them write poetry while incorporating humor).

Thanks to Meliara, my beta reader, as always, for keeping me from writing anything stupid; I would never post anything without your approval.

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